Alexa ranking increasing while traffic increases | Bloggers Lair | Yakezie Forums

Post edited 6:20 pm – August 6, 2012 by JW @ AllThingsFinance

Hopefully somebody can shed some light on an issue I cannot explain – my Alexa ranking is getting worse while my traffic reaches new highs.

I started my blog just over three months ago and like most, my Alexa ranking was in the millions. Since starting the Yakezie challenge, my ranking dropped at a very solid pace. About 1 week ago, I hit a low of 214,000 but that's where it stopped. From that low, my ranking has gone up approximately 6000 positions per day and I now sit at 243,000.

Here's the kicker – my traffic has increased 3 to 4x during this same period. According to Google Analytics, my site averaged 25 visitors per day up until 10 days ago. I now average 75 – 100 users per day.

Whenever something unexpected happens, I always think back to what I changed. The only thing I've done was upgrade AVG antivirus from 2011 to 2012, but I haven't found anything online associating AVG with Alexa toolbar conflicts. I visited Alexa.com today to reinstall the toolbar but it's unavailable for maintenance (to fix a problem perhaps?).

Has anybody else experienced this recently?

I've had a very similar experience JW. The past couple of months I've confidently gone from 8,000,000(!) down to 210,000 a few weeks ago, then it's slowly been creeping backwards to around 230,000. A bit frustrating but I figured it's just an inevitable bump (bit like the stock market eh?) rather than a linear progression. Am still wondering if and when I'm going to reach that exalted sub-200k…maybe any Yakezie members who haven't checked me out yet might like to assist? Thanks guys. 

This used to bother me too, but now it thrills me.  My visits have been soaring, but my Alexa is also at an all time high.  What this means is that although not many Yakezie members have been visiting the site (I have not been active lately) I have been getting new visitors and a fresh audience is always a good thing.  And if you want to help your Alexa numbers, just keep being active here and that will help. 

Outside of the bloggers and internet marketers.. I don't think a whole ton of folks have the Alexa toolbar installed.

If you want your Alexa to drop.. Being active here in the forums and commenting your fellow bloggers is your best bet.

Of course, if you are getting more traffic from search and other methods, that is really not a bad problem to have.  We know that those users are far more likely to click on advertisements and such.. (but less likely to comment)..

Thanks everybody for your input.  Since nobody reported any kind of Alexa conflicts, I can rule that out.

As you all have said, the toolbar is only used by a minority so the results may not reflect the increase in general traffic that I'm receiving. The disparity has definitely caused me to put a lot less focus on the rating.  However, I can see why it's a good metric to use when determining someone's acceptance into Yakezie – more forum/member interaction usually results in a lower Alexa rating.

Post edited 12:24 pm – August 8, 2012 by KyleAAA

Alexa ranking has almost no relationship with traffic. To put things in perspective, my main site averages over 2000 visitors per day and my current Alexa ranking is 293,000. It was over 350,000 a few months ago (even though my traffic has gone down a bit since). Your Alexa ranking is still better than mine even though I have 20-25 times the traffic you do. Go figure.

Conclusion? Ignore Alexa completely. It means nothing. It's a horrible, meaningless metric.

The question is like even with 8 – 10 times the population why China and India are poorer than America?

My Alexa has been increasing even though I'm on a Yakezie team.  I know they've been visiting since most of them leave comments.  I suppose it would have increased even more if I weren't on a team.  My overall traffic is down and I haven't been posting very much the last couple of months so it isn't too surprising that my Alexa ranking has increased.  It isn't my main concern, but I'd still like to see it go back below 200,000.  That is a requirement to stay in Yakezie, isn't it?

MoneyBeagle said:

KyleAAA said:

 

Conclusion? Ignore Alexa completely. It means nothing. It's a horrible, meaningless metric.

I wouldn't ignore it completely but I wouldn't put too much focus on it either.  My goal is to have good metrics across the board, so I look at page rank, Alexa, mozRank, domain authority, page authority, feedburner stats, pageviews, siteviews.  You'll have ups and downs across the board.

For useful metrics I would agree; however, Alexa doesn't even pretend to be a meaningful metric anymore. It used to be relatively widely used in the industry (as in, BIG sites such as CNN, etc would use it). Now, nobody does. It was abandoned for a reason.